CCRKBA & SAF News 3rd, 4th Oct 2008

NEWS RELEASE

www.ccrkba.prg

NEW STUDY SAYS GUN SHOWS DO NOT BOOST HOMICIDES, SUICIDES

BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today applauded a new joint University of Michigan – University of Maryland study that says gun shows do not contribute to higher murder or suicide rates.

“We’ve known all along that gun shows are not the arms bazaars for criminals and lunatics that anti-gunners have claimed,” said CCRKBA Legislative Director Joe Waldron. “This important research has now confirmed that such gatherings are not connected to homicide or suicide rates. The study reinforces earlier research done for the Department of Justice that found less than one percent of armed felons get their guns from gun shows.

“Gun control lobbyists are already claiming the report is flawed,” he continued. “What else would they say about research that demolishes one of their most hysteria-driven platforms? The tide is turning on the gun rights issue, because research trumps rhetoric every time.”

The study, released Wednesday by the UM’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, compared data from Texas and California, two markedly different states. Researchers gathered crime and suicide data from the periods surrounding more than 3,400 gun shows to determine that restrictive regulations had no impact on murder or suicide rates in the month following those gun shows.

“This research punches a gaping hole in the argument by gun control fanatics that a mythical ‘gun show loophole’ contributes to crime and suicide,” Waldron stated. “Thanks to this study, the anti-gun rights lobby loses another cornerstone of its agenda. For years, no matter what the crime, gun banners have invariably reacted by suggesting that added restrictions on gun shows would somehow have prevented it.

“As our friends at the Michigan Gun Owners have noted, we wonder why it took someone this long to conduct such a study,” Waldron noted. “Our hats are off to the UM’s Prof. Brian Jacob, along with the University of Maryland’s Randi Hjalmarsson and Mark Duggan. Theirs is a significant accomplishment.”

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From SAF
www.saf.org

NEWS RELEASE

SAF FILES AMICUS BRIEF IN NORDYKE CASE SEEKING 2nd AMENDMENT INCORPORATION

BELLEVUE, WA – Arguing that the Supreme Court opened the door toward incorporation of the Second Amendment in its landmark ruling in the Heller case, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has filed an amicus brief in the long-running case of Nordyke v. King, a challenge to the gun show ban in California’s Alameda County.

Russell Allen Nordyke had been fighting the Alameda County gun show ban on First Amendment grounds, but a ruling in the case by a district court judge opened up a Second Amendment issue. This is a critical issue for all Americans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual civil right to keep and bear arms.

Filing the brief on SAF’s behalf before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is attorney Alan Gura, who successfully argued the Heller case before the high court earlier this year. Noting that “The right to bear arms clearly meets the modern incorporation standard,” Gura’s 33-page brief offers a historical Second Amendment perspective, and dismantles, step-by-step, arguments that the amendment does not apply to the states or local governments.

“It is unfathomable,” Gura writes, “that the states are constitutionally limited in their regulation of medical decisions or intimate relations…but are unrestrained in their ability to trample upon the enumerated right to arms designed to enable self-preservation.”

SAF founder Alan Gottlieb said the brief “covers every argument supporting incorporation in remarkably concise language that is well-supported by court precedent, historical documentation and just plain common sense.”

“The Heller ruling defined the Second Amendment as the founders intended,” Gottlieb stated, “and an affirmative ruling in the Nordyke case will help assure that this right properly limits state and local governments from regulating this important civil right into oblivion.”

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